As announced earlier in bionet.forum, we will soon implement a new
policy to control spam in unmoderated bionet groups. The original
message is copied directly below. Appended after it is a copy of my
proposed new group charter for BIO-SOFT/bionet.software. It is not
intended to change the status quo for serious scientific discussion,
but only to eliminate commercial and pornographic spam messages. If
you have any suggestions for change in the text or in the policy,
please let me know within the next few days.
Thanks,
Serge Taylor
Biosci Administrator
Stanford University
============== original message ==============================
As part of our effort to eliminate "spam" messages which are offensive
and distracting to the scientific discussions which the Biosci
newsgroups are designed to facilitate, we are creating a new type of
moderated newsgroup -- "Moderated (only to filter out spam)".
Our rationale is that only what usenet recognizes as "moderated"
newsgroups can filter mail postings, yet it has proven difficult to
find volunteer moderators from each newsgroup.
Our intention is to use a combination of human and software filters to
eliminate the most egregious examples of spam. Since we value
diversity of opinion in scientific communications, and recognize that
our efforts are unavoidably subject to both Type I and Type II errors,
we aim to err on the side of allowing arguably scientifically relevant
communications to be posted.
We intend to convert all the unmoderated bionet newsgroups to the new
status as soon as possible, and forsee two situations:
(1) Where a charter exists for an established but unmoderated group,
we will take the current charter and add the following language (taken